top | item 28531581

(no title)

Can anyone in the know compare and contrast bespoke's feature set with Max for Live? (https://www.ableton.com/en/live/max-for-live/) It also has a circuit diagram-ish UI and supports scripting with Node. Put another way, does Ableton already offer Ableton smashed to bits with a baseball bat?

(fwiw, you have to pay for the $1k suite version of Ableton to get Max, so Bespoke could still be a great alternative even if they do a lot of the same things)

discuss

andrewmg|4 years ago

Standalone Max is available for $10 / month.[0] And the similar Pure Data is open source.[1]

[0] https://cycling74.com/shop

[1] https://puredata.info

zwegner|4 years ago

I only found out about Bespoke a few minutes ago, but I will say using Max as a programmer can be incredibly frustrating. I've made a handful of nontrivial M4L devices and have run up into tons of weird decisions, limitations, bugs, and plenty of Ableton crashes. (Caveat: this information in this post is mostly from a couple years ago and might be out of date, I haven't gotten the latest Ableton)

The JS support is really weird. It's only JS 1.6 (from 2005), and had weird glitches (like loading two instances of the same device causing the first device to stop working), and I couldn't get the timing tighter than about 30ms. Ideally you could write code that runs at audio rate.

There's also "gen", which is a Max-specific scripting language that is presumably real-time suitable through a JIT. Unfortunately you need a separate Max license to use it, even the full Ableton Live Suite doesn't give you gen support. You can sorta hack around and use it by manually editing the .maxpat files (which are almost JSON), copying from a device that uses gen, but there are lots of weird glitches going this route.

A list of a few annoying things about M4L:

* Documentation is pretty sparse and/or low quality, and weirdly split into two (help and references).

* All variables are global across devices by default, local (device-specific) variables need the prefix "---", which is barely documented

* Tons of annoying UX issues, like entering an invalid value in the inspector just reverts to the old value. You can't enter an empty string for parameter values, that reverts too (you need to enter a literal ""). Certain functionality is only available depending on whether the device is "locked", so you have to lock/unlock the view all the time if you're working with e.g. subpatchers

* Abstraction is quite annoying to do. There's three different types of patches, and it's not really clear what the difference is between them. Creating subpatches and then duplicating them creates two different subpatches--changes in one are not shared with others.

* ...and a ton of other things. I have a big text document of these gripes I was intending to turn into a blog post, but haven't gotten around to it.

Maybe I'm wrong and there's better ways to do some of these things, but overall my experience learning M4L was pretty bad. If it wasn't the only way to do certain advanced things in Ableton, I'd never touch it again.

iainctduncan|4 years ago

I'm also a programmer, and it sounds to me like you're expecting Max to be something it isn't. It's not meant to be a regular programming environment, it was created to be accessible to non-programmers. But you can extend it with C, C++, Java, Csound, Chuck, SuperCollider, etc.

I will agree however that the JS implementation is neutered, probably because they have to worry about support volumes. This is one of the reasons I created Scheme For Max, which unlike the JS object, allows running in the high priority thread, does hot code reloading, and is open source and can be recompiled to your liking. Now that I have Scheme for Max, I love Max (and Max4Live) to bits, they are a fantastic environment, and I do all the coding in S7 Scheme or C. :-)

https://github.com/iainctduncan/scheme-for-max

tomduncalf|4 years ago

Yeah Max’s JS support is pretty weird.

I spent some time figuring out nicer ways to work with it in order to build an Octatrack-style parameter crossfader for M4L, it provides some abstractions and setup to make using Typescript with Max a bit more pleasant. Still plenty of limitations but I was able to get my device working pretty well in the end. Apologies for lack of docs!

https://github.com/tomduncalf/livefader

WillEngler|4 years ago

Yeesh, thanks for sharing all this. I would eagerly read that blog post!

I've gotten really into Ableton this past year and I've been curious whether I should get into Max for Live. Being a programmer and looking at their marketing materials, it seemed like it should tap into the right parts of my brain. But seeing your comment now ... maybe not the right move. Especially because I'm not looking to accomplish anything special, I just want a sandbox to play with digital audio concepts.